This is a game for masochists. The basic gameplay is somewhat simple, place factories, make stuff for soldiers, get resources, make soldiers, fight, research, do focuses. That stuff is fine. But there are a ton of hidden mechanics, numbers, edge cases, random menus etc that make playing this game miserable, and having 0 feedback doesn't help. Why are my 5 billion divisions not winning? Because barely any of them are actually fighting and are in the reserves. Why? Who knows, go google the division planner and combat width and suffer.

Both the main game and the following DLC are fun as hell, mixing tense horror with action movie dropkicks and parkour. While the main story can be infuriatingly poorly written at points (Crane use the damn vial you still have), some of the side quests are pretty well done, such as the dad who wants custody of the son or the kid missing his dog. Weapons are fun to use when the enemies aren't insanely tanky (most of the time) or when they break (you can only repair a weapon a max of 3 times before you need to do a random defence mission? really), but you don't need them too much in the open world if you keep running and just dropkick/grapple anything in your path, although the quests do tend to force you into combat encounters you will almost certainly die to in 5 seconds.

Don't play on nightmare, it gives you no bonuses until you unlock the legend tree and spawns 5 billion virals. Not too fun for when you're trying to do parkour challenges.

Pretty big improvement over 2. Enemies have coloured lights to signal attacks ala Metal Gear Rising, levels are longer and more interesting, tons of bonus levels and new gimmicks, and everything flows alot better. However, gripes including getting caught on tiny bits of elevation rather then simply stepping over them (presumably because of how loops work), enemy doors killing flow, and some difficulty following twisting paths due to spark not turning very easily.

Also the story makes no bloody sense lmao